Physical and virtual machines over their lifetime have their operating systems and applications periodically upgraded by the installation of patches and updates. Examples of such patches and updates include, but are not limited to, service packs, hot fixes, fixes for security issues, and fixes for bugs in the installed versions of the software. Such updates sometimes affect the files in the defined set that need to be replaced during the creation of a virtual machine facsimile of the physical machine. Consequently, it may be critical to identify the updates that affected each file in the defined set of files in order to locate the correct version of the corresponding replacement file.
Once the relevant set of updates has been identified, the updates need to be downloaded from a repository of updates and examined to locate the replacement files. The appropriate replacement files need to be copied onto the virtual machine facsimile. Such a download and replacement process needs to be performed during every virtual machine facsimile creation.
Current solutions for the replacement problem typically address it using a manual process to identify and download the relevant updates, and by building customized scripts to find and replace the affected files in the facsimile. Such a process requires a trial and error approach, as well as user intervention, to keep the scripts current as new updates are released for the operating system and the applications. This can be a tedious and repetitive task as new updates may be released frequently. Changing the replacement scripts often imposes an additional test burden to ensure that they continue to operate correctly.